Thursday, January 23, 2014

Day 19: Launcher Video and More CAD

We finally have some good video of our launcher prototype. It's performing as we expected, with a wide range of potential shots, some of them we didn't even think about as we were designing it. Again this was inspired by Boom Done and we want to thank them for such a great idea.

Our original chassis that will be used for our practice bot weighed in at 19.84lbs. It was made from 1/8" aluminum and didn't have much weight reduction.

The new chassis will be made from .09" thick Aluminum and will weight in at 11.84lbs, It is sliced and diced to cut weight. We know this will add a lot of chassis flex but since we are using Mecanum wheels we're alright with that.

We're also working on the lightening pattern for the back of the robot. Put your opinion in the comments.

Option 1: Standard Diamond Cutouts

Option 2: Spectrum Cutouts Standard

Option 3: Spectrum Cutouts with Reverse

We should be driving this weekend, with or without Mecanum wheels, as the practice robot is just about finished being wired. Our goal is to finish the CAD for all the mechanisms over the next two days and have drawings ready to go to Solarcraft to be cut and bent early next week.

- Spectrum

"Whenever I tackled the impossible or the miraculous, I remembered the magician Rene Lavand, who had only one arm. Poet and extraordinary card manipulator, he baffled fellow illusionists by concluding his brilliant demonstrations with, "What I just showed you can also be done with two hands!" - Philippe Petit, Man on Wire, 2002, p. 236.

1 comment:

I really like option 3, It looks quite nice. One thing with option 1 is I was told that in order to get more structural integrity out of that type of pattern is to use a linear patterned X that was drawn from corner to corner. (I received that info from James Tonthat mentor of 1477 and member of Copioli Build Blitz)